The work of the Italian writer Svevo reflects the frontier city of Trieste through a double register of language and dialect. However what might be considered the typical dualism of many of our writers, acquires ethical connotations in relation to the sense of falsehood and truth that another authority may invest. It is one of the various frontiers that Svevo crosses by means of novelistic detachment, and it helps to compromise, among other things, his ambivalent relationship with the psychoanalytical concept of fiction